Wyoming Star, April 24, 2026: Zunes offered a bleak long‑view:
“It’s hard to see an end to the conflict any time soon. Hopefully, both sides now recognize they cannot achieve their aims through full-scale war, but the positions of the two sides appear to be as far apart as ever. The fact that Trump is continually contradicting himself makes things even harder to predict. The best-case scenario at this point is that Iran would agree to end its blocking of shipping to the Arab Gulf states in return for the United States ending their blockade of Iran and leaving the other issues for later. The most likely scenario, however, involves a long, drawn-out conflict, with both sides jockeying for control of the Strait of Hormuz while the global economy worsens.
The 2015 nuclear agreement made it impossible for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Despite this, two years later, Trump ended up reneging on sanctions relief, so the Iranians resumed uranium reprocessing to a much higher degree than the treaty allowed. Trump still insists he can do a better deal than Obama. However, the original nuclear agreement was a result of two years of intense, painstaking negotiations using the United States’ most experienced diplomats, mediators, and technical experts. It also included negotiators from Great Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations. For Trump to assume that he can simply send his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, and his inexperienced vice-president J.D. Vance to Pakistan for a day or so and negotiate a new and better agreement is ludicrous, particularly given the Iranians’ understandable lack of trust in the United States.
There are certainly many in Lebanon who would agree with Israel that Hezbollah should be disarmed. However, the corrupt and inept Lebanese government is unlikely to risk a civil war to do so. Israel has proven repeatedly that they can’t destroy Hezbollah either.
It’s ironic Israel is now occupying southern Lebanon on the grounds they must defeat Hezbollah when Hezbollah was formed as a direct result of Israel’s earlier occupation of southern Lebanon in the 1980s.”